There is a conventionally known electronic camera that carries out a BSS (Best Captured Selector) operation. The BSS operation is an operation to select an image that was captured in good condition from a group of continuously captured images and stores the selected image (see Japanese Patent Unexamined Application Publication No. Hei 11-136557, for example).
On the other hand, there is another known electronic camera that stores therein RAW data (see Japanese Patent Unexamined Application Publication No. 2001-223979, for example). RAW data is subjected to almost no image processing, so that it is faithful to a raw output signal of an image sensor and contains abundant information on an image at a time when the image has been captured. Moreover, the RAW data generally is large in quantifying bit number and is also a signal containing abundant gradation of the image.
For example, the RAW data mostly has 12-bit gradation in each color while general-purpose image data has 8-bit gradation in each color.
From the above features, the RAW data is suitable for complex or sophisticated image processing.
The conventional electronic camera selects image data containing a large amount of information on an image according to the file size of a JPEG compressed file.
For recording the aforementioned RAW data, however, the recording route or procedure therefor is greatly different from that for typical image data, so that no JPEG compressed file is created.
For this reason, no conventional electronic camera has the BSS operation for RAW data.